Yes those site builders are complex beasts but they do fulfil a specific criteria so we shouldn’t be too harsh on them. The problem though is the bloat needed in order to achieve designs for everyone and their reliance on jS to fit everything.
I’m wondering perhaps whether it might be easier to hide those image on desktop and display them as background images down the sides? It all depends on how this site is to be managed and whether you will be changing content and images regularly. The wix site manually places all the images into the grid positions so that one can’t be changed without going back into the sitebuilder anyway I assume (unless they have some script in place to handle dynamic content)
As I said in the previous post you could simply absolutely place those image to the sides into their correct positions but I’m not a fan of that unless there is no other way to do it automatically.
Another option would be to duplicate the images in the html and then just hide/show as required. That would allow an easy 3 column layout method which can turn into one column by just hiding the 2 side columns and turning back on the images in the middle column. Again I’m not a fan of duplicating code but as it is just an image it will already be cached and is not like duplicate text content.
I’ve been coding sites for clients for about 20 years on a freelance basis but strictly just front end html/css. I was usually employed by design agencies to produce templates that they could then take over and code the backend. I was coding about 5 PSDs a week at the height of the boom and usually turned around a front page and a few cover pages in less than a day. However I have also worked on one or two large sites that have taken years to complete.
I also co authored one of the first books on CSS about 13 years ago. Mind you things were a lot easier in some respects then as we didn’t have as much to work with (although browser differences were the bane of our lives especially IE6). I’m retired now though and just do this for a hobby thankfully .